An Insurgent Prevails in Delhi

Delhi is too hard-bitten a city to shock easily, but it reeled on Sunday morning, as the votes were tallied for the state-assembly election held last week. The upstart Aam Aadmi Party, barely a year old and still starry-eyed about the transformative power of politics, was expected to be little more than a minor nuisance for its two larger rivals. The Indian National Congress, which has ruled Delhi for fifteen years (and has run the country at the head of a coalition since 2004), and the Bharatiya Janata Party were masters of the dark art of voter mobilization. Their systems of patronage had been entrenched for decades. An idealist upstart like the A.A.P., which was founded to carry forward the agenda of a checkmated anti-corruption campaign, wasn’t supposed to stand any chance at all.

By noon on Sunday, though, Delhi seemed to have walked into some parallel political universe. The A.A.P., which had been expected, at best, to win six or seven of the seventy seats in Delhi’s state assembly, won twenty-eight. The B.J.P. took thirty-one seats—five short of the majority needed to form the government—and the Congress was crushed, reduced to eight seats. There was more bad news for the Congress: it lost to the B.J.P. in three other states whose results were announced on Sunday. It’s hard to say whether this drubbing represents bad news or very bad news for the Congress in next year’s national elections, which they are largely expected to lose. But the wider results were almost eclipsed by the shocking upset in Delhi, which may have even more profound implications for the future of politics in India.

In September, I wrote about Arvind Kejriwal, the Aam Aadmi Party’s founder and insurgent-in-chief. Kejriwal had been an income-tax officer until 2006, and he became infuriated by the deep dysfunction of Indian governance. The aam aadmi (common man) was being ill-served, he thought, by politicians who broke laws with impunity, and by bureaucrats who demanded bribes to provide the most basic services. Kejriwal quit his job to become an activist, orchestrating a series of telegenic protests in 2010 and 2011, years that were ripe with corruption in government. When he realized that his activism had reached its limits, Kejriwal launched his own party, railing against multi-billion-dollar scams and attacking the Congress and the B.J.P. for their complicity in each others’ abuses of power.

Having announced that his party would contest the state elections in Delhi, Kejriwal did not set his sights low. “We have to win Delhi,” he told me back in February. At the time, I thought that this was sweet but brazen, considering his party was a ragtag bunch of underfunded political novices. Off the record, Yogendra Yadav, a political scientist and one of the A.A.P.’s leaders, admitted to more modest goals. I won’t be breaking any confidences now if I relate that Yadav, at his most optimistic, hoped to win ten per cent of Delhi’s votes. “I’ve seen too many vote-share tables in my life to expect miracles,” he said with a laugh. Such caution seemed sensible until two days ago, when it emerged the Party had tripled that mark.

On Sunday evening, as he delivered press conferences and made the rounds on news channels, Kejriwal looked a little thunderstruck. Again and again, he laid out the names and the ordinary backgrounds of his party’s winning candidates. Rakhi Birla, a former journalist, had defeated a Congress minister, Raj Kumar Chauhan, who had won his past four elections. Akhileshpati Tripathi, a thirty-year-old who had arrived in Delhi four years ago, from a small Uttar Pradesh town, had won his seat handily. So had Surender Singh, a commando who had helped to storm the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai after terrorists attacked it in November, 2008. “Who are these people?” Kejriwal asked, almost in wonderment. “They’re just ordinary people.”

He didn’t mention the most magnificent victory of all: his own trouncing of Sheila Dikshit, the three-time Chief Minister of Delhi, by a margin of more than thirty percentage points. When Kejriwal had announced that he would challenge Dikshit in her own constituency, the pundits had groaned. It seemed like a grand gesture but also a grand folly: surely the creaky Congress machine could still secure its own chief minister’s reëlection.

A little more than a month ago, Dikshit boasted that Kejriwal was “not even on our radar.” Perhaps this is the sort of thing that politicians must say in order to project an overweening confidence that makes voters feel silly if they don’t buy it. Kejriwal did the opposite. “Who am I? At the end of the day, I am nobody,” he said on television on Monday. “All the votes that came to me came because people were angry.” These remarks appear disingenuous in print, but he delivered them with his trademark earnestness, like a schoolboy trying to convince a friend that he’d lucked out in a multiple-choice exam.

By the conventions of Indian politics, the A.A.P. did other things wrong as well. Having raised the two hundred million rupees (a little more than three million dollars) that it thought was necessary for a fighting chance in the Delhi election, the Party asked donors to stop giving it money. None of its workers were paid; they were all volunteers. There was almost a gleeful disdain for “identity politics” in the way that candidates campaigned without appealing to loyalties of caste or religion. The Party assiduously avoided drafting candidates with prior political experience. In theory, the Party could also have attempted to form the next Delhi government by soliciting “outside support” from the Congress’s eight legislators to take it past the majority. But it has chosen not to do so, unwilling to stain the moral purity of its victory. The Congress and the B.J.P., which loathe one another, are equally rotten, Kejriwal said. He added, mischievously, “Let them form the government together.”

The only way the A.A.P. stood any chance of setting itself apart, Kejriwal understood, was if it visibly and methodically defied every piece of received wisdom in the playbook of Indian electioneering. Only the chronically insulated in India could fail to sense a simmering discontent with the way that politics is conducted. To use the colorless words of capitalism, there is a huge market for a clean, efficient party. In one of his television interviews on Sunday, Kejriwal told the story of a young man whom the A.A.P. wanted to name as a candidate in Delhi. The contender’s father, Kejriwal said, “came to my office and fell at my feet, asking that we not nominate his son. Why? Because politics is the business of thugs.” I was reminded of the plaque that hangs on a wall in one of the Party’s offices, on which is printed a quote by Mahatma Gandhi: “I have entered politics to rescue politics from its bad reputation.”

The usual caveats apply to the Aam Aadmi Party’s sudden explosion in status and popularity: the Party’s economic manifesto is still muddled, it has still never governed so much as a municipal ward, and scaling its successes in urban, middle-class Delhi across a vast, rural country will require all manner of fresh thought and strategy. But, after Delhi, when Kejriwal says, “This is just the beginning,” as he did on Sunday, to his party workers, he will sound neither sweet nor brazen. He will sound like a man who is rolling up his sleeves and preparing himself for the long, hard slog.

Samanth Subramanian is the India correspondent for The National and the author of “Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast.”